Cross Platform Development: Challenge for Mobile Application Developers

Posted by Fluper on May 4th, 2018

“Multiple devices are a part of my life. In an evening, I made few calls using my Android mobile phone and later after dinner, started watching a popular TV series on my iPad lying on the bed. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, but woke up in the morning, when my smartwatch asked me to go for morning walk.” I don’t want to restrict with a particular device or OS; my choices evolve, so the devices.

Multi-platforms is a great choice, especially when you know the pro and cons of using it.
Creating an app that works on all platforms is an interesting task, however, some developers find it difficult. Switching from one device or platform to another is tempting when you don’t need to bother of sticking to one. This is technically a challenge for developers as they have to code universally which works well with any device. Going native is an ancient tale, it would have gone out if developers start using the cross-platform technology.

Though, this is not easy, yet it could be possible with the PhoneGap and Xamarin like frameworks. Mobile application developers have an upper hand here with these cross-platform as they can deliver a solution for their clients. This helps to reduce the cost associated with the app development on multiple platforms.

The common challenges are the user interface or UI design, navigation controls, screen ratio, upload time, performance capabilities of different devices, and graphics with 3D capabilities experienced by the developers in a cross-platform development. Well, an expert can easily cope with these challenges using frameworks like PhoneGap and Xamarin.
Some more challenges with cross-platform development as listed here.

• Need to create the correct design approach
• New mobile devices emerging in the market
• New OS versions
• Better screens
• Non-optimized DOM structures
• Unsuitable image scaling

The cross-platform mobile development gives mobile application developers an opportunity to deliver an application to various platforms at a time without rewriting the code. The code will work for all mobile operating systems without even changing it for a different operating system. As C# is one of the most preferred languages that developers use for writing a cross-platform application code, this makes easier for developers while using Xamarin.

It is also helpful, as you can get the single application design for all platforms, rather create individual designs. Here, the freedom is for developer to customize it for each platform if needed. The performance is one of the key features of a mobile app, interestingly Xamarin makes sure to keep the performance consistency with all OS.

Let’s have a look over the opportunities with cross-platform development.

• It reduced costs
• Less time required
• Unified marketing
• Easier deployed
• It consumes less energy
• Decent support for cloud services
• Widespread technologies for cross-platform development

The real challenge is how quickly developers adopt the changes and grab this opportunity to capitalize the cross-platform development. Though, major players are still working on different platforms separately; but it has huge potential for start-ups as well major companies.